multilingual websites and rtl direction - best practices

Question

Could you share any tips for supporting rtl direction in multilingual websites?

Apart from the text direction, should there be any changes, for instance, to the menus mark-up? The rtl CSS should be included in a separate file (like "layout-rtl.css") or a "rtl" class should be added to the body tag? I would like to know stuff like that.

I found a few tips here, but I would really appreciate someone's advice at first hand (someone that has already launched a website in a rtl language).

Answer 1

what we do is declare some parameters in php like :

SIDE : right
OPOSIDE : left
DIR : rtl
OPODIR : ltr

for every site languages.

and we deal with only one css file and one template with divs, we add to css or template file replacement place holder

like :

float : {SIDE}
...

and we generate a real css file with php (replacements all what need to be replace), and the site take the css file that belong to him .

now you can do it with css framework like : LESS , BLUEPRINT , XCC